Q&A with Kyle Miller

Pylex® Herbicide is a versatile product from BASF that offers best-in-class control of even the toughest weeds in cool-season turf. We spoke with Kyle Miller, Senior Technical Specialist – Turf and Ornamental Products at BASF, to learn more about what Pylex herbicide brings to turf management and why they’ve coined it the Swiss army knife of herbicides.

1. What key benefits can Pylex herbicide bring to a lawn care program? What about a golf course program?
We can go into cool-season lawns or golf course turf and make multiple applications of Pylex herbicide and control what’s in there so that you don’t have to kill areas and then reseed them. It’s very good on Bermudagrass, crabgrass and a number of other grassy weeds, like nimblewill and dallisgrass.

Goosegrass is a weed that we didn’t have a lot of options to control effectively. It happens to be one of those weeds that is very sensitive to Pylex herbicide, so we can control it fairly easily.

2. Pylex herbicide has best-in-class control of goosegrass. What other key weeds is Pylex herbicide excellent at controlling?
Crabgrass, barnyard grass, foxtails, many broadleaf weeds like speedwells, dandelions, clovers, oxalis — it’s got a nice balance of grassy and broadleaf weeds that it controls, so that comes in handy on the golf course and in lawn care situations.

3. Pylex herbicide has very low use rates. Tell us about the rates needed for various program types, such as removal of Bermudagrass, goosegrass and other key weeds.

We use this at rates of 1-1.5 ounces per acre, whereas a lot of the herbicides we use in our market are 1-1.5 ounces per thousand square feet. We basically have 43 times lower rates than many of the herbicides we use, which is pretty neat.

4. When spraying a lawn, do you recommend a tank-mix with Pylex herbicide since it is a “bleaching”-type mode of action?

Plenty of superintendents and lawn care operators don’t mind bleaching the weeds that they’re targeting because people will see that they’re out there trying to control the problem. If I’m a homeowner, I like to see that things are working, so if I have some weeds that are bleached out a little bit, I don’t mind that.

The recommended tankmix would be Pylex herbicide plus Drive® XLR8 herbicide because it gives us the best of both worlds. It gives us more consistent, broader spectrum weed control.

They cover a lot of the same weeds, so we can get away with reduced rates of both products and have a consistent, sound herbicide for both grassy weeds and broadleaf weeds.

5. What are three things about Pylex herbicide that are helpful for a golf course superintendent or lawn care operator to know?
Be mindful of these very low use rates. A lot of people think it’s 1-1.5 ounces per thousand square feet and they need to recognize that it’s per acre.

Always use a methylated seed oil (MSO) or crop oil concentrate (COC) or some kind of high-quality surfactant to improve foliar uptake.

Get ready for some really great control of a number of weeds that you’ve struggled with before because we feel like this product fits an excellent niche in herbicides.

_{Always read and follow label directions.}

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